Hi steemit! I'm webmink

Well hello there. I'm delighted to discover steemit - remarkably I proposed just such a blockchain-based system to colleagues back in 2014.

I've been in the computer industry for over 40 years and I've worked at a bunch of big companies. More recently, I was in charge of open source software at Sun Microsystems and supervised the open-sourcing of Java, Solaris and the rest of Sun's software just in time to save some of it from Oracle.

Since then I have been volunteering as a director at the Open Source Initiative (OSI - where I was president for three years too) and at The Document Foundation (who make LibreOffice) and at the UK's Open Rights Group, while freelancing both as a writer (especially at InfoWorld but also at ComputerWorld and for Linux Magazine) and as a management consultant. It's hard to get paid for writing and consulting around open source, so I experimented with alternatives like Patreon and BitCoin.

I'll post things I think this community will find interesting and hope you all agree! Thanks for having me!

(I was surprised to find my picture on the check-in decor at JavaOne in 2009!)